There’s something in the air — but what the heck is it?

You might avert your eyes and ears from the onslaught of advertisements urging you to buy, buy, buy, but what do you do when shops, hotels and grocery stores try to hook you through your nose? (Terrible imagery, my apologies.)

The New York Times’ home magazine this weekend featured this story by James Vlahos on the emergence of scents used to entice shoppers.

The piece focused on who’s using this strategy and whether it can work. (Will the smell of oranges, vanilla and cedar in Sony Style stores put female shoppers at ease? Could be.) To me, those questions are less interesting than what’s in the fragrances and what those exposures mean.

The last I checked phthalates — hormone disrupting chemicals associated with developmental defects — were a common ingredient in fragrances, possibly including those pumped into the air and inhaled by unwitting shoppers and employees of businesses embracing scent-driven sales.

Here’s an excerpt from the NYT story:

Take a whiff. Maybe you’ve noticed — and maybe you haven’t, and this isn’t entirely by accident — that the world has lately become a more fragrant place. Westin hotels waft a blend of green tea, geranium and black cedar into lobbies; Sheraton has jasmine, clove and fig. Jimmy Choo stores smell of cardamom and ivy, while Thomas Pink opts for the tang of fresh linen. Artificially introduced aromas are seemingly everywhere, and while certain applications are obvious — like pumping the smell of fresh-from-the-oven bread into a supermarket to draw shoppers to the bakery department — a growing number of companies employ the technique to sell products with no intrinsic odors.